A number of techniques exist for controlling one or more lighting devices such as the luminaires illuminating a room or other environment, e.g. to switch the lights on and off, dim the light level up and down, or set a colour setting of the emitted light.
One technique is to use an application running on a user terminal such as a smartphone, tablet, or laptop or desktop computer. A wired or wireless communication channel is provided between the user terminal and a controller of the lighting device(s), typically an RF channel such as a Wi-Fi, ZigBee or Bluetooth channel in the case of a mobile user terminal. The application is configured to use this channel to send lighting control requests to the controller, based on manual user inputs entered into the application running on the user terminal. However, this is not very user friendly.
Another technique for controlling lighting devices is gesture control. In a system employing gesture control, the system is provided with suitable sensor equipment such as a 2D video camera, a stereo video camera, a depth-aware (ranging) video camera (e.g. time-of-flight camera), an infrared or ultrasound based sensing device, or a wearable sensor device (e.g. a garment or accessory incorporating one or more accelerometers and/or gyro sensors). A gesture recognition algorithm running on the control receives the input from the sensor equipment, and based on this acts to recognise predetermined gestures performed by the user and map these to lighting control requests. This is somewhat more natural for the user, but still requires an explicit, manual user input.
Some techniques do exist for automatically controlling the lights in a building or room, or the like. These involve detecting the presence of a user by means of a presence detector such as a passive infrared sensor or active ultrasound sensor. However, these techniques tend to be quite crude in that they only detect whether or not a user is present in a certain predefined zone of the building or room, and simply turn the lights on or off or dim them up and down in dependence on whether or not present.